You Really, Really Need to Understand Economics

It should be obvious to just about everybody, even disregarding recent history, that a working knowledge of economics is pretty much an obligation for any citizen of any democratic country, especially those that are capitalist. For instance, there is fairly strong evidence that the recent economic kerfuffling could've been prevented if certain electoral decisions had gone otherwise maybe ten or twenty years ago. Or maybe five or ten years ago, if you're on the other side of the debate. Either way, you've got to believe it matters.

But the good news is, learning economics, at least enough to be a competent citizen-voter, is not all that hard.

Half the difficulty is penetrating the jargon, in my opinion. The actual meanings of all the wacky terms are, mostly, pretty simple and common-sense, or at least they have been to me.

The other half is understanding the math, and it's not all that hard math actually. A good friend of mine (http://vort.org/) once told me most of economics is just adding and subtracting. Sometimes the numbers can be very big, but luckily big numbers are just as easy to understand as small numbers. In fact, there is no conceptual difference between the two.

So, for fun and my own education, I think I'll start learning basic economics from the ground up, and then talking about it here. Nah, actually, science is way cooler and way more interesting. I was sort of a policy & current events wonk for a long time (long influence of the debate team from high school I bet), and lately it's just not worth it. Nobody interrupts you to question your value as a citizen or whether or not you really love your fellow man when you talk about how awesome it is that Voyager 1 is about to become the first man-made artifact to enter interstellar space.